The phonetics of newly derived words: Testing the effect of morphological segmentability on affix duration

Plag, Ingo; Ben Hedia, Sonia

The phonetics of newly derived words: Testing the effect of morphological segmentability on affix duration

dc.contributor.author	Plag, Ingo
dc.contributor.author	Ben Hedia, Sonia
dc.date.accessioned	2019-04-11T15:24:45Z
dc.date.available	2019-04-11T15:24:45Z
dc.date.issued	2018
dc.description.abstract	Newly derived morphologically complex words have played a prominent role in research on morphological productivity and lexical innovation (e.g. Baayen 1989, 1996; Plag 1999; Mühleisen 2010). Most of the attention concerning the properties of such words has been devoted to their phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic properties (see, for example, Bauer et al. 2013 for such analyses). This paper takes a look at the phonetic properties of affixed words, testing Hay’s (2003) ‘segmentability hypothesis’, according to which newly derived words are expected to show less phonetic integration, hence less phonetic reduction, of the affix involved than established forms. This hypothesis is based on the idea that morphological segmentability negatively correlates with phonological integration. To date there is only one study that clearly confirmed the segmentability hypothesis (i.e. Hay 2007), while other studies have failed to replicate the effect (see Hanique and Ernestus 2012 for an overview). The present study investigates the issue with data from the Switchboard corpus for five affixes of English: un-, locative in-, negative in-, dis- and adverbial -ly. Using different measures of morphological segmentability, we demonstrate that the durations of the two prefixes un- and dis- (unlike the durations of in- and -ly) largely support the segmentability hypothesis. With un- and dis- prefixed words, prefixes that are more easily segmentable have longer durations.	en
dc.description.sponsorship	This research was partially funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgmeinschaft (Research Unit FOR2373 ‘Spoken Morphology’, Projects PL 151/7–1 and PL 151/8–1) and the Strategischer Forschungsfonds der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, which we gratefully acknowledge.	en
dc.identifier.citation	Plag, Ingo & Sonia Ben Hedia. 2018. The phonetics of newly derived words: Testing the effect of morphological segmentability on affix duration. In Sabine Arndt-Lappe, Angelika Braun, Claudine Moulin & Esme Winter-Froemel (eds.), Expanding the Lexicon: Linguistic Innovation, Morphological Productivity, and the Role of Discourse-related Factors, 93–116. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter Mouton.	en
dc.identifier.uri	https://researchdata.hhu.de/handle/entry/69
dc.identifier.uri	http://dx.doi.org/10.25838/d5p-6
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.publisher	HHU	en
dc.rights	Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States	*
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/	*
dc.subject	linguistics	en
dc.subject	morphology	en
dc.subject	phonology	en
dc.subject	phonetics	en
dc.subject	morphological segmentability	en
dc.subject	speech production	en
dc.subject	affixes	en
dc.subject	English	en
dc.title	The phonetics of newly derived words: Testing the effect of morphological segmentability on affix duration	en
dc.type	Other	en